NATO bombing of Yugoslavia: Symbolic stage of current World War

Claudio Gallo is a journalist, currently working as a culture editor at La Stampa, one of the main newspapers in Italy. He was foreign desk editor and London correspondent. Occasionally he writes for AsiaTimes and Enduring America. His main interest is Middle East politics. He was on the streets during the disputed Iranian elections of 2009 and during the start of the so-called Egyptian Spring in 2011. He writing focuses on the Shiite world: Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. He is banned from India because he supposedly wrote that the real country is very different from the officially publicized image. He likes to interview the last few thinkers who provide alternatives to prevailing ways of thinking.

A Bosnian Serb man surveys damage near the town of Brod September 8, following a NATO air raid here two days ago. (Reuters) / Reuters

If we jump for a minute out of the ever-flowing river of the news, we might realize our being deep inside the Fourth World War.

It started in 1989 with the fall of Berlin Wall that marked the
end of the Third one, aka the Cold War. The last chapter of WW4
is obviously the failed attempt to expel Russia from Crimea, but
up to now its more symbolic stage remains the NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia that started on March 24, 1999, exactly 15 years ago.
It was a war against Slobodan Milosevic, but also a war to shift
eastward NATO influence and boundaries.

Operation Allied Force, as NATO called it, consisted of 78 days
of bombing Milosevic’s Yugoslavia with a progressive intensity,
passing from military to civilian infrastructures targets. About
200 Serb civilians died as collateral damage (against about 300
who died in Kosovo, mainly ethnic-Albanian), while NATO had
virtually no casualties during operations, only a few soldiers
dying in alleged incidents.

‘Perfect’ war

It was the Perfect War. British Military historian John Keegan
repented almost theatrically on the Daily Telegraph for his
initial old faith in foot soldiers: “There are certain dates
in the history of warfare that mark real turning points (…) Now
there is a new turning point to fix on the calendar: June 3,
1999, when the capitulation of President Milosevic proved that a
war can be won by airpower alone.”

A very clean war with a lot of smart bombs capable to split hair
over Serbia and strike only the bad boys, as suggested by the
drumming propaganda. To present to Western public opinion such a
war of aggression inside Eastern Europe as a Just War was not an
easy task in the beginning. But the Hidden Persuaders had on
their side the experience of George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War. If the
Gulf War was the first televised war, seen through the kind
choice of CNN cameras, Yugoslavia was the first internet war.

They had to find a symbolic triggering. This was the Racak
massacre, a Kosovo village in which 45 ethnic Albanians were
killed by Serbian Army in response to the shooting of four Serb
policemen. The NATO narrative was that the bombing was a
consequence of Serbian ethnic cleansing, but the truth was, on
the contrary, that was NATO intervention to trigger some
operations against Kosovo population, in the contest of the war
against the separatists of KLA, supported by the US and Germany.

Labour MP Tony Benn (who died a few days ago) said in the British
Parliament: “Whatever the legality or morality of the war
that has been launched against Yugoslavia, the bombing has
gravely worsened the refugee crisis.”

Richard Gott of The (above all suspicion) Guardian believed that
“the sudden Kosovo population displacements were triggered by
NATO bombing and by the decision of Western governments to impose
impossible conditions on the Serbian sovereign state.” As
noted in those days always by the Guardian: “The KLA has been
resupplied with weapons smuggled across the border from Albania
and has reoccupied villages vacated by Serb security
forces.”

About Racak also The (above all suspicion) Times had some doubts:
“The reality of what happened at Racak is still shrouded by
claim and counter-claim. What is known is that four Serb
policemen were killed outside the village in a Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) ambush. Subsequently at least 40 ethnic Albanian men
from the village were shot in a dawn attack by the Serbs. The
Serbs say that all the dead were KLA guerrillas killed in action.
The Albanians say they were all civilians killed after
capture.”

But a trigger is not enough, to convince people you need an
ideology, because in spite of the death of ideology proclaimed by
triumphant neoliberalism, ideology is more alive than ever. Human
Rights was this ideology. Let’s be clear: who is against human
rights? But one thing are the human rights for which Guatemala
Bishop Juan Gerardi was killed by death squads in 1998 for
example, another thing is the ideology of Human Rights defended
by George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

‘Humanity’ pretext

In the UK, to pave the way for this operation, was the 1997 New
Labour Manifesto. It was the creation of ‘ethical foreign
policy’: “Labour wants Britain to be respected in the world
for the integrity with which it conducts its foreign relations.
We will make the protection and the promotion of human rights a
central part of our foreign policy. We will work for the creation
of a permanent international criminal court to investigate
genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

"Whoever says 'humanity' wants to cheat," wrote
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, then quoted by Carl Schmitt. ‘Whoever
Says Humanity’ is also the title of the book that Danilo Zolo,
professor of philosophy of law and of philosophy of international
law at the University of Florence, wrote on those days. “In the
early 1990s,” says Zolo, "humanitarian intervention" was
a key element in the international strategy of the US. It claimed
that "global security" required that the great powers responsible
for world order felt the Westphalian principle of
non-interference in the domestic jurisdiction of national states
to be out of date. The war sparked off by the United States
against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - the war in Kosovo in
1999 - finally established the practice of humanitarian
interventionism. The humanitarian motivation was thus taken
explicitly as just cause for a war of aggression. And the United
States has stated that the use of force for humanitarian reasons
was legitimate, even though in contrast with the United Nations
Charter, the principles of the statute and the judgment of the
Nuremberg Tribunal, as well as with international law in
general.”

The Italian philosopher Costanzo Preve titled his book on NATO
bombing ‘The Ethical Bombing’. Preve said: “The US
has created a tragic situation in which the philosophy of
universal human rights conflicts directly with its distorted
caricature, the ideology of exporting human rights by armed
might. In its original Greek meaning, tragedy refers to a
hopeless situation where any decision is a bad one. The question
of human rights today is perhaps the most tragic of our times. On
the one hand, people throughout the world definitely need to be
educated to respect human rights. Moreover, this education ought
to be philosophically anchored in a real universal dialogue
without the obscene prejudice of Western superiority,
particularly its most despicable version which comes to us as a
divine mandate issued from Ronald Reagan’s City on a Hill. On the
other hand, the total subservience of the United Nations to the
US and its ignominious puppet regimes has led to a condition of
rampant international illegality.”

Ironically, in Italy the Bomb-Bomb-Bomb Milosevic coincided with
the first prime minister to come from the old Communist Party,
Massimo D’Alema. Wrote the former President of the Republic
Francesco Cossiga: "The landing of the ‘Communist’ D'Alema at
Palazzo Chigi (the seat of government) took place with the full
Washington support, in return to the guarantee that Italy would
not pull back in the Kosovo War."

Even more ironically, the bombing started the same year in which
the euro was born. With the attack on Yugoslavia the Clinton
Administration took the occasion to demonstrate worldwide the
political inconsistency of the New Europe, always dependent on
the US. Fighting for the ideology of Human Rights in Kosovo,
Europe was indeed fighting for the Imperial agenda.

To quote the Italian philosopher Diego Fusaro: “With the
collapse of the bipolar structure of the universe, it has started
a new phase of conflicts, all different, and at the same time all
inside the new Fourth World War. This one is a geopolitical and
cultural war declared by the Universal Monarchy to the rest of
the world. A war against all the peoples and nations that are not
ready to submit themselves to its power, i.e. to its politics of
world’s dominion trough the commodity-form.”

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.